The Passion Artist


John Hawkes - 1979
    When Vost discovers that his daughter has become a prostitute, and that the women prisoners are in revolt, he embarks on a fantastic series of violent and erotic encounters, exploring the shifting balance of power between the sexes, and the limits of human perversity.

Ox-Tales: Earth


Mark Ellingham - 2009
    Earth features stories by Rose Tremain, Jonathan Coe, Marti Leimbach, Kate Atkinson, Ian Rankin, Marina Lewycka, Hanif Kureishi, Jonathan Buckley and Nicholas Shakespeare, and a poem by Vikram Seth.The idea behind Ox-Tales is to raise money for Oxfam and along the way to highlight the charity’s work in project areas: agriculture in Earth, water projects in Water, conflict aid in Fire, and climate change in Air.

The Carnivore


Mark Sinnett - 2009
    In the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel, a young cop, Ray Townes, emerges as a hero. There are numerous accounts of his bravery, of the way he battled all night to save those who were trapped in houses swept away by the raging Humber River. His story is featured prominently in the newspapers, thrusting him into the spotlight as a local celebrity. His wife performs her own small miracles that night. Mary is a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital and she treats many of the survivors. The emergency room is overrun; the hallways are slick with river mud: of course, her feats go almost unnoticed. But among the victims she treats there is a woman, disoriented and near death, who reveals mad-seeming details of her ordeal — details that lead Mary to doubt her husband’s heroism. The officer and the nurse (with a new house, new friends, and plans for a family) try to normalize their life together in a shell-shocked city, but Mary also searches for the truth about her husband. Is he simply the tired hero who stares out at her from the cover of the Globe and Mail, or is it a much darker figure who sits across the table from her at breakfast? Definitive answers are elusive . . . Fifty years later, when a reporter comes knocking, wanting to revisit that violent night, the missing details finally surface — and threaten to destroy them.

Primary Obsessions


Charles Demers - 2020
    Annick Boudreau regularly confronts a myriad of mental health issues in her psychology practice at the West Coast Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia. But even Annick is stunned when Sanjay, a young patient who suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, is arrested for the brutal murder of his roommate. While Sanjay is tortured by repeated violent thoughts, everything Annick knows about her patient and his illness has her convinced that he’s innocent. But the police and prosecution are convinced that they have caught the perpetrator and aren’t interested in looking for other suspects. Unable to talk to the authorities because of doctor-patient confidentiality, Annick feels compelled to investigate on her own, finding herself drawn into the darker side of her postcard-perfect city in the process.

Isobel


James Oliver Curwood - 1913
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Is He Mr. Right?: Everything You Need to Know Before You Commit


Mira Kirshenbaum - 2006
    Right? Tired of wasting time with one Mr. Wrong after another? You're not alone. Too many of us make bad decisions about the men in our lives and end up committing to relationships that don't bring us the happiness we deserve. Now you can have that crystal ball you were wishing for. With this groundbreaking book, internationally recognized relationship expert and bestselling author Mira Kirshenbaum turns her attention to the most common relationship question women have: Is he the one I should commit to? This is the only guide you'll ever need to answer that question once and for all. Offering savvy, straightforward advice gleaned from helping thousands of women find lasting love, Kirshenbaum offers the only step-by-step strategy for determining whether or not you should commit. "Is He Mr. Right?" will help you: - Decide if your guy is a keeper--or not - Identify the Five Dimensions of Chemistry and how to tell if you and your man have it - Understand the secret of women who find love: dump the duds fast - Focus on what you need to make you happy--and get it You will discover what you really want from a relationship, learn how to trust yourself again, and stop wasting time with guys who aren't right for you. A must-have for any woman, "Is He Mr. Right?" provides the tools you need to find real happiness in love.

Scarecrone


Melissa Broder - 2014
    Melissa Broder deepens the explorations of hunger and mystery and laughter that she began in MEAT HEART (Publishing Genius Press, 2012). The poems in SCARECRONE are consumed by universal questions, directed unapologetically back to the universe. The poet didn't ask to exist, but since she's here, she's not taking anything for granted.

How Insensitive


Russell Smith - 2002
    Searching for work, sex and big-city life is Ted Owen, who quickly finds himself swept into the complicated lives of the young and the jaded, people who thrive in a strange world of hip fashion and surreal night-clubs.

The Good Neighbor


William Kowalski - 2004
    For Colt, the house will become a trophy representing his enormous success at trading stocks. For Francie, a blocked poet, the house seems to whisper hints for reawakening her creativity.Picking up the house for a song, the couple begins the transition from city dwelling to country life and find for the first time in too long that they have something to work on together. Yet the more the Harts learn about the house, its history, and its previous inhabitants, the more it drives them apart. And when Francie discovers an old family cemetery hidden on the property, it somehow brings out qualities in each of them that come as a total surprise to the other.Events that conspire to destroy their marriage could just as easily bring the couple together again in this story of two people who, in looking for a place to call home, find themselves instead.

The Fearsome Particles


Trevor Cole - 2006
    Now the Governor General’s Award finalist is back with The Fearsome Particles, a brilliantly observed comic tragedy about the widening cracks in a family’s picture-perfect veneer. Gerald Woodlore, a window screen executive, wakes one morning to find, to his utter dismay, that he has reached the limits of what he can control. The company he works for is rapidly losing market share and a junior assistant seems to be the only one with an idea how to fix it. His wife, Vicki, a luxury real-estate dresser, appears to be bending under the pressures of constructing an image of perfect happiness both at work and at home. But most worrying of all is Gerald and Vicki’s twenty-year-old son, Kyle, who quit school to volunteer with the military’s civilian support staff in Afghanistan. Now he has returned early and retreated to his room in the wake of a mysterious and traumatic event. With his trademark wit and strong emotional insight, Trevor Cole has created a compelling, tender story that captures a family at a crucial turning point.The Fearsome Particles has recently been optioned for film.

The Sharecropper Prodigy


David Lee Malone - 2012
    Tom is white, Ben is black. This sometimes creates problems in this particular time and place.A black kid growing up in the height of the Great Depression in rural Alabama, being raised by an alcoholic, abusive father. This is not the place, nor the circumstances, you would expect one of the brightest young minds of the time to emerge. But Ben has an insatiable thirst for knowledge and a dogged determination to rise above the stigma that has followed his race and family for generations. These character traits, along with some fortuitous events, are about to propel Ben into history. But first, he must overcome poverty, racism and youth, as well as a murder charge.

Hummingbird


Tristan Hughes - 2017
    This is what I had been told back then, and what I had tried very hard to believe in since." Beside a lake in the northern Ontario wilderness, fifteen-year-old Zachary Tayler lives a lonely life with his father, his only neighbours a leech trapper, an eccentric millionaire and an expert in snow. All Zack has for company is the harsh and moody landscape, which holds both beauty and terror in its depths and whispers with the promise of dark, secret spaces and undiscovered worlds. Summer and life change with the arrival of the mysterious Eva Spiller, who is determined to find the spot where her parents disappeared in a floatplane after flying off from the lake. While trying to navigate between summer and winter, the living and the dead, the past and the present, Zack and Eva grow closer. The people of Sitting Down Lake will have to rely on each other to come to terms with the past and realize that death is never final: something always remains. In his fifth novel, award-winning author Tristan Hughes has created a vivid and poetic coming-of-age story about loss, absence and redemption.

Divorcer


Gary Lutz - 2011
    DIVORCER is a collection of seven harrowing and hyperprecise short stories about ruinous relationships and their aftershocks.

The Horseman's Graves


Jacqueline Baker - 2007
    Proclaimed by reviewers to be “a rural J.D. Salinger,” Baker received the prestigious Danuta Gleed Award and her collection was listed among Maclean’s Top 10 Books of the Year.The Horseman’s Gravesreturns us to the harsh locale of Sand Hills on the Saskatchewan-Alberta border, where Baker unfolds a tale of a small German immigrant community caught between the promise of this new land and the weight of a European past, with its hatred, fear and old-country superstitions. Lathias is a half-breed farmhand, a young loner who becomes the unofficial guardian to the Schoff boy, a golden child until a terrible farm accident scars his face and his mind. Both boys are drawn to Elisabeth, a savagely beautiful girl, whose stepfather, Leo, is the local scapegrace, a man whose cruelty is both a source of amusement and shame to the townspeople. When Elisabeth, watched only by the Schoff boy, falls through the ice into the river, no one foresees how it will be the end—and the beginning—of everything. A novel so lyrical and hypnotic that it begs to be read aloud,The Horseman’s Graves is a pitch-perfect rendering of small-town immigrant life. Told through the unforgettable narrative voice of a seeall neighbour, it is filled with memorable characters: a blustering, pious priest; a mysterious “witch” faith healer; the town busybody; a fearful young farm wife who is virtually worked to death. An extraordinarily accomplished work, The Horseman’s Graves is a profound testament to our universal search for love and redemption.

The Island Hideaway


Louise Candlish - 2013
    But on the shimmering, sun-drenched Sicilian island of Panarea, distractions come in many forms - including her fellow hotel guest Lewis, an enigmatic Englishman with secrets of his own to protect. And then there's Frannie, a young Italian actress on the island to prepare for her first film role, who is as charming as she is beautiful. Can she really be so perfect? And shouldn't Eleanor be the first to suspect that things might not be as they seem?The Island Hideaway is a surprising, insightful and compelling novel from the bestselling author of Since I Don't Have You.Previously published as Prickly Heat.